I’m pleased to say that we released SimpleForm 1.4. Like the last version, this release had a lot of contributions from the community, closing bugs and adding some nice features. Here is a brief introduction to some of the new features:

Custom Form Builders

Now you can set a custom form builder that inherits from SimpleForm::FormBuilder:

And use it straight in the simple_form_for helper, like the example below:

CustomBuilder) do |f| %>

Custom Inputs

SimpleForm has many different inputs available in its source code. But, sometimes, depending on the business logic the application requires, we need to add new inputs to make our work easier. Before this version, you had to explicitly define your new input inside SimpleForm namespace for it to work. Furthermore, customizing existing SimpleForm inputs could only be achieved through monkey patching.

Inspired by a similar feature in the Formtastic gem, from now on you will be able to create new input types inside app/inputs folder in your application. The only restriction to create such inputs is that the class name must end with Input. See some examples:

HTML 5

SimpleForm allows you to add many HTML 5 features to your applications, like placeholders, inline browser validations and more. The problem is: most browsers are still experimenting some HTML 5 features, and people started having lots of troubles with the automatic browser validation.

For this reason, SimpleForm now has an option to easily disable such form validations. You have to add this line to your SimpleForm initializer:

config.browser_validations = false

But, if HTML 5 is still not for you, you can disable all the HTML 5 stuff, by adding the configuration below to your initializer:

config.html5 = false

Notice that this option does not disable the `placeholder` component, because we believe this option is very well supported currently in mostly browsers. If you don't want to use it as well, just remove it from the `components` option in your initializer.

More Helpers

In this version we also add two new form helpers to SimpleForm: input_field and full_error.

The full_error helper shows errors in an attribute prepending its human name. This can be used when you want to show errors on hidden fields, for instance. You can see how it works in this example:

f.full_error :token #=> Token is invalid

The input_field helper renders only the input tag with all the facilities of SimpleForm's input helper. It means no wrapper, error or hint will be rendered. A good example of using this helper is inside an input block:

:integer do %>
:integer, :type => :range %>
'max_time_value' %>

It will render:

Max time *1

Wrapping up

This version allows you to do more customizations in SimpleForm based on your applications needs. We encourage you to take a look at the CHANGELOG and also review the README to see what else is available and some more examples.

Right now, we are working on Rails 3.1 compatibility for the next version. If you feel like helping us or just want to see a new feature, feel free to send us a pull request. And last, but not least, we look forward to know how SimpleForm is changing your life. Is it being helpful? How does it improve your applications? Don't be shy, comments are welcome.

Excellent! Love SimpleForm. Been working on doing something cool with it, Modernizr, YepNope, and H5F.js. Basic goal is to make it very easy to polyfill HTML 5 features. Hope to get it out soon, but been a bit busy.

Anyway, love the lib, thanks so much for all the work and the recent updates that make it so easy to customize it.